cjones@honors.montana.edu (Chris Jones) writes:
> I just used netstart.local.  It was called from approximately the right
> place in /etc/rc.  Just make sure you call dhclient in the foreground, not
> the background.  It needs to block until it gets interfaces configured, at
> which point it backgrounds itself.

This is what I did too, with one embellishment.  If the machine didn't
get a good enough dhcp reply, then it wouldn't bother to start the
network daemons either.  For a portable that might be used off-net
this saves quite a bit of disk IO, which in turn saves the battery.

Using resolv.conf to key off of should admittedly be done better, but
I didn't have any bright ideas.

Excerpted from /etc/rc, just after call to /etc/netstart:

    # are we off the net?  overload resolv.conf.  sorry. -wsr
    if [ ! -f /etc/resolv.conf -a -f /etc/rc-offnet.conf ]
    then
	    echo "The Network is DOWN.  Not starting the army of daemons."
	    . /etc/rc-offnet.conf
    else
	    echo "The Network is UP.  Starting all the daemons."	
    fi

The file /etc/rc-offnet.conf is an edited version of /etc/rc.conf that
has most of the daemons marked as NO.

-wolfgang